I’m a moderate user of Facebook. Don’t tell my colleagues, but I guess I check it at least a couple of times a day and I find it a really great way to keep in touch with a wide range of people - friends, colleagues and customers. So when a company that I know quite well mentioned in an email that they had a Facebook presence, I decided to give it a go and I signed up as a ‘fan’.

I have to say that I’m pretty sceptical about whether the social networking arena is a good one for corporations to play in - or whether companies will always end up looking like that person who never gets invited to parties since they buttonholed everyone else to try and recruit them to their pyramid selling scheme (correction - network marketing). But, I wanted to put my scepticism behind me, so I signed up.

So that was a few days ago, and since then I’ve heard nothing. I suppose I’m not quite sure what I was expecting - they’ve already got several hundred people signed up so I knew that I was unlikely to get personal treatment - but I knew (or at least hoped) that if this had been an email marketing programme I’d signed up to, I would have had at least one welcome email by now, and perhaps an offer or two. And now this particular company has got a small black mark against them in my mind. It’s not huge, but it’s still there nonetheless - a feeling that I’ve been let down. I know it hasn’t been that long since I joined, but still - I expected something.

The point is that I’m now more disappointed than if that company had never suggested to me that I should join them on Facebook. They opened up an expectation, and then didn’t fulfil what I had hoped would happen.

It made me think back to 10 years ago when organisations were clamouring to set up Web sites, but weren’t prepared to dedicate any resources to keeping them updated. With my then consultant hat on, I remember trying to get people to understand that to have an out-of-date Web site was worse than not having one at all. It seemed to be a hard message to sell to managers - but perfectly understandable by the poor marketing managers who had simply been handed a whole new medium to deal with and just told to get on with it, using whatever resources they currently had.

So whilst I’m all for experimentation and boundary pushing, and I really welcome organisations that are trying to mould these new tools for themselves rather than simply letting others do it for them, it’s clearly not going to work well unless there is some serious follow-through there.

The digital world is changing incredibly fast these days. Twitter is only a couple of years old, and now it’s the talk of the town. But who knows what the picture will look like in another two years from now. As a catch phrase from a UK lottery TV show goes, ‘you’ve got to be in it to win it’ - you’ll never be able to lead the field in innovation unless you try things out.

But if you do, then make sure you do it properly - or you’re going to find yourselves unfriended very quickly!

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About The Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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